The Ivory-billed Woodpecker was a remarkable and charismatic bird, once inhabiting the southeastern United States, particularly in bottomland hardwood forests and swamps. It was a beautiful black beast — with white wing patches, and a vivid red crest. Due to logging, land conversion for agriculture, overhunting for specimen collection, and the millinery trade, it went extinct in 1944. It is far more difficult to pinpoint the extinction of good poetry — the sort of writing able to freeze yr spine, grind yr teeth, and cause audible, gasp-filled weeping — and its absence continues to cause catastrophic tragedy for our collective psyche.

In 2004, sightings and recordings prompted an expedition led by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, which reported evidence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker for the first time since 1944, six decades after extinction and supposed annihilation. It is impossible not to draw parallels from this mythical bird to the debut chapbook “I’m Just Waiting for Something To Happen” by Jake Beka and Felix Da Costa Gomez — evidence of persistence. Evidence of a mystical good — still existing, still possible.

Beka, already established as a sonically diverse, independent musician — formerly under the moniker EmoSnowAngel — starts us off with the first half of the chapbook. His work is distinctly Calgarian — located in popular transit lines and districts while colliding between philosophical pilgrimage and mundane life. Friendships with anarchic bonding. He shares hedonism, retreating from harsh realities through intoxication, concerts, tattoos, house shows — and a longing for spiritual enlightenment. Admissions of suicidal thoughts are juxtaposed with astrology, trivial conversations, and music, showcasing simultaneous banality and complexity we’re faced with. By invoking prominent philosophical figures, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Beka infuses his poems with existentialist undercurrents, bleeding into absurdism and fatalism as his work progresses. There is no mistaking Beka’s sincerity — his raw, straightforward poetry allows him to bare his soul to the reader — confessing to not wanting to necessarily feel better, but just to feel different for once — an antidote to our “dead birds and pure chaos”.

Da Costa Gomez’s section of the chapbook comes after Beka’s, appearing to be two distinct styles that come together to form a stratified poet, exemplifying a (rare, possibly non-existent?) positive portrayal of earnest masculinity. Splinters of affective sexuality, difficult sibling love, revolutionary thought, and reminders of what it is to be alive — all scratch-zapping at the hum of our plague, economic destructiveness, and silence. While Beka is a ferociously good poet, Da Costa Gomez is transcendental. He is a once-in-a-lifetime artist. He influences every writer he comes across. His transgressive nature makes an easy comparison to Charles Bukowski, who received widespread recognition in his early 50s. Da Costa Gomez, in contrast, is only 19-years-old, and unflinchingly explores the human capacity for sin and redemption. He accesses a stream-of-consciousness not seen since James Joyce or Virgina Wolfe, and yet the poet is pure modernity — contemporary references and colloquial language give his work accessibility because of its profundity, not in spite of it. Perhaps tragically, it is the same modernity fueling his resentment and fury. How effortless it is to paint Da Costa Gomez as a bitter, angry man — fiercely political, and even more fiercely struggling. This struggle is witnessed through the lens of an urban wanderer or ‘flâneur’, a term of French origin popularized by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, a motif throughout Da Costa Gomez’s work. The flâneur, the non-participating, mirrors the speaker’s detached observation of his surroundings and his role in them. In “Frozen Lasagna”, the flâneur manifests in the speaker’s refusal to take responsibility for his future, rejecting the societal expectations his sister adheres to. This nonchalance toward life is, in fact, his rebellion against the pressure to succeed and conform. Da Costa Gomez is confessional, too, reminiscent of American poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell — the speaker’s flâneur existence is not static but evolves, finding catharsis and epiphany in the sincere, post-postmodern attempt to try and love and fuck and write. In this chapbook, he only shares nine poems, and yet he gives us everything.

Despite various sightings and audio recordings, there is still heavy skepticism whether the Ivory-billed Woodpecker remains. In September 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducted two public comment periods during 2021 and 2022, an announcement of the decision is expected by the end of 2023. The same skepticism greets micro presses and chapbook publishers, but it is easily countered when viewing the evidence presented in “I’m Just Waiting for Something to Happen”. The evidence of living, breathing poets. Like the species of birds which have also been unfairly destroyed, we have to be willing to open our eyes and listen, rather than to rapidly discount and ignore. Literature such as the writing of Beka and Da Costa Gomez, take into account the aviary conditions and constantly remind us of the smell of the very air we are breathing. If I can bring in the canon card, I will — there are two names which have to be alive in CanLit: Felix Da Costa Gomez and Jake Beka. CanLit has committed a multitude of sins over the past few centuries, but not canonizing the work of these two men would, in my opinion, render our national literary landscape unsalvageable. How privileged I am to have met Felix and Jake, and have the privilege of calling the two my friends. They both are evidence of persistence.

Buy “I’m Just Waiting for Something to Happen” on Amazon now.